This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention disclosed below. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived, implemented, or described. Therefore, unless otherwise explicitly indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
A cellular telecommunications network is an arrangement of interconnected telecommunications devices distributed over land areas divided into cells, each cell being served by at least one fixed-location transceiver or base station configured to provide radio coverage based on a defined set of frequencies of radio spectrum. When the cells are joined together, radio coverage is provided over a wide geographic area to enable portable transceivers (e.g., mobile communications devices such as phones, walkie-talkies, laptops, tablets, and the like) to communicate with each other. Communication takes place via the use of carriers in the forms of modulated signals of given bandwidths that convey information over channels.
Carrier aggregation is used to increase transmission bandwidths and to provide higher rates of data transfer relative to data transferred over a single carrier or channel. Carrier aggregation involves combining individual component carriers (CCs), each of which has a particular bandwidth. For each CC, there is a primary downlink carrier and an associated uplink carrier, the association of which is specific to each cell.
Current mobile network operators (MNOs) have acquired exclusive usage rights for certain frequency bands and have little incentive to share these frequency bands with other operators, despite significant research and regulatory efforts. Due to high cost and spectrum scarcity, it can be expected that an efficient use of available radio spectrum in 5G networks will rely on the sharing of radio spectrum rather than on exclusive license agreements between competing MNOs.